Prior art publications, such as books, generally comprise text and images which are, for the most part unstructured or, if in electronic format, include only the most basic structure such as bibliographic information, chapters, an index, and so forth. If a publication is in paper form, the publication may be scanned and stored in an electronic readable format, such as through optical character recognition.
When a book is converted or authored in electronic form it is presently limited in how the book is structured or organized. However, once in a computer readable format, the book consists of images with underlying textual data and it becomes searchable, as in the case of an e-book. Such e-books are widely available online and can be downloaded and read on a number of electronic devices such as an Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, tablet computers running an Android operating system (OS), laptop computers, desktop computers, and the like.
When referring to the aforementioned prior art publications, the use of the terms “unstructured” or “basic structure” herein means that the publications consist of the actual creative content of the publication and conventional metadata (“conventional metadata”). Examples of conventional metadata includes a chapter listing, an index, an appendix, names of authors, editors, and contributors, owner of the copyright, year of the copyright, numeric or alphanumeric codes such as an international standard book number (“ISBN”) for finding information in the book, and so forth.
An electronic book such as any of those mentioned above by way of example provide a more flexible reading experience for the user. Such e-books also benefit authors, publishers, and sellers in that an electronic book can be sold electronically (e.g. via a web site or mobile electronic device), can include copyright controls, can more accurately account for sales and apply royalties, and so forth.
So, while electronic books provide some features such as quick searching, they remain limited in many of the ways that printed books are; they are static publications. Thus, a need presently exists for systems and methods for interactive mobile electronic content creation and publication.